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Auto Accidents Causes Information
Many factors result in car accidents, and sometimes multiple
causes contribute to a single accident. Factors include the following:
* Driver distraction, including fiddling with technical devices as noted
previously, talking with passengers, eating or grooming in the car, dealing with
children or pets in the back seat, or attempting to retrieve dropped items.
* Driver impairment by tiredness, illness, alcohol or other drugs, both legal
and illegal. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is an organization made up of
the families of the dead who were killed in car accidents caused by drunk
drivers.
* Mechanical failure, including flat tires or tires blowing out, brake failure,
axle failure, steering mechanism failure.
* Road conditions, including foreign obstacles or substances on the road
surface; rain, ice, or snow making the roads slick; road damage including pot
holes.
* Speed exceeding safe conditions, such as the speed for which the road was
designed, the road condition, the weather, the speed of surrounding motorists,
and so on.
* Road design and layout. Some roads are notorious for being accident "black
spots" for a whole variety of reasons, many subtle and not necessarily
immediately obvious. These include alignment, visibility, camber and surface
conditions, road markings, etc. Finding out the causes for a repeated series of
accidents on the same stretch of road is becoming a science in itself.
Many authorities emphasize speed as an inherent cause of accidents in itself,
though most experts agree that speed alone is rarely a prime cause of accidents,
though naturally a mis-application of speed can be a contributing factor, and
higher speed in an accident resulting from whatever cause is more likely to have
serious consequences. Critics of the "speed kills" mentality claim that this
approach ignores the complex factors that are involved in accidents, and argue
that it amounts to little more than a simplistic "quick fix" or political
solution that does nothing to address the true causes of accidents. Proponents
state that going slower at least can do no harm, and that physics is on their
side, since the outcome of an accident largely depends on the energy dissipated
in a crash, and that energy rises with the square of velocity, according to the
equation E = ½ ·m·v², where E is the kinetic energy, m is the mass, and v is the
velocity.
Attempts to force car manufacturers to limit the top speed of vehicles has so
far been resisted by both the manufacturers and governments themselves. Partly
this is because the car manufacturers have substantial political lobbying power
and speed and performance are powerful marketing tools, and partly because it is
easy to show that such measures are unlikely to have a significant effect on the
road toll, and might then force governments to seriously address the more
complex causes of accidents. A recent proposal in Australia for car
manufacturers to fit speedometers which are blank above 130 km/h (whatever the
actual top speed of the vehicle) has proved extremely controversial, and legally
unworkable, according to most commentators.
Rubbernecking is where drivers slow down to look at accidents or anything out of
the ordinary on the highway. Events ranging from gruesome car accidents to a
police car stopped on the shoulder can cause traffic jams on both sides of the
road, even if the roadway has been cleared.
Although caution is advised when there is unexpected activity on the side of a
road, a car with a flat tire on the side of a highway often causes as much slow
down as a real accident would due to rubbernecking. The slowdown in traffic
persists even after the accident scene has been cleared if traffic is dense.
Traffic experts call this phenomenon a phantom accident. Often this behavior
causes additional and sometimes more serious accidents among the rubberneckers.
For more free legal information on Auto Accident Causes, please use the
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